Michelin Vitoria will stop production on January 13 and 14 due to a lack of rubber supply

The management of the Michelin factory in Vitoria-Gasteiz informed workers’ representatives on Friday that it will close the factory on January 13 and 14 due to a lack of rubber.

The strikes will affect 913 workers and will force a reduction in production of 40,000 passenger wheels, 280 tons of civil engineering tires and a thousand tons of production of various rubber compounds.

The four Michelin factories in Spain will be forced to deactivate shifts for two days from next Friday to January 15 due to the lack of natural rubber, a fundamental raw material for the production of tires, derived from the crisis at sea Ed.

At the plant in Vitoria-Gasteiz, the largest the multinational has in Spain with around 3,500 employees, management met today with the unions to specify the shifts that will be deactivated.

Union sources have explained that these cuts will be implemented using the flexibility in the company, but management has not told them anything about when they will have to work later to make up for the two days that will now stop.

In this sense, they have expressed their discomfort because the workers already have a large ‘debt bag’, that is, they owe the company days for forced business interruptions.

It also did not inform them if they have any predictions on whether the outages will repeat, given the uncertainty over the situation in the Red Sea.

The problem lies in the lack of security for maritime transport in the Red Sea due to attacks by Houthi rebels on ships passing through it as a result of the war between Israel and Palestine, forcing suppliers to use other routes to reach Europe areas, such as the Cape. from Good Hope in South Africa, a much longer route causing delays in receiving rubber.